


sweet pies to fill the void

by jimtiberiuskirk



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Hockey, M/M, Multi, alternate universe - food
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-01-21 00:03:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21290390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jimtiberiuskirk/pseuds/jimtiberiuskirk
Summary: Kent is thumbing through a food magazine aiming to be irreverent (the cover is a peach with a pair of chopsticks punched into the flesh) when Eric Bittle takes the seat across from him. A winsome, Southern sweet-tea smile spreads across his face, and Kent abruptly feels undeserving – although that could just be a by-product of being Kent Parson.
Relationships: Eric "Bitty" Bittle/Kent "Parse" Parson, Eric "Bitty" Bittle/Kent "Parse" Parson/Jack Zimmermann, Kent "Parse" Parson/Jack Zimmermann
Comments: 11
Kudos: 64





	1. one

**Author's Note:**

> disclaimer: this is, shamelessly (or maybe with a little shame), a self-insert fic. i am a food writer. i hope you still enjoy.

**Bitty’s Bakery**  
  
Sweet pies to fill the void  
_Kent Parson_  
  
There’s an old-fashioned jingle which ushers in your entrance to this teeny-tiny bolthole, along with buttery wafts of traditional pies. The baked treats pushed against the finger-stained glass – from grubby, indecisive hands hovering over the selection, no doubt – are lined up in too-neat rows, and I immediately want to mess it all up. Luckily aproned baker/owner Eric Bittle stops me from inching behind the counter and swiping a slice of every pie by waylaying me with bite-sized samples spilling over with filling.  
  
**[Click to read more]**  
  
  
**one**

Kent is thumbing through a food magazine aiming to be irreverent (the cover is a peach with a pair of chopsticks punched into the flesh) when Eric Bittle takes the seat across from him. A winsome, Southern sweet-tea smile spreads across his face, and Kent abruptly feels undeserving – although that could just be a by-product of being Kent Parson.

“Hey, Bits,” Kent says. He shoves his reading material (questionable) underneath the cushion garnishing his seat and wishes he could fold himself there too. “How are you?” 

“Super. _Sweetener _just published a profile on me titled ‘Baking Boy Wonder’, I haven’t gotten any sleep in 24 hours, and Jack’s parents are coming in at 5pm, probably expecting a fucking feast awaiting them at the dinner table from the fucking Baking Boy Wonder.”

“Gee golly, mister,” Kent says. “That’s a lot of swears.”

“Fuck off,” Bitty laughs and then puts his head into his hands.

“Just take Jack’s parents to, like, Amuse-Bouche_. _I really doubt they’ll care.”

Bitty lifts his head up and spreads his fingers across his face, one eye peeking out from between them. “Amuse-Bouche has, quite possibly, the worst dessert to ever grace a ‘Best Of’ list, and you want me to bring my future husbands’ parents there?”

“Yeah,” Kent says, and shrugs. “You’re such a snob.”

Bitty barks out a laugh. “Says you, Mr Food Critic. Now, please stay on topic and solve all my problems.”

Kent met Eric Bittle two years ago when his boss shoved him out the door and sent him on his way to a small hole-in-the-wall bakery that Kent ended up rhapsodising about. (The sell of the story was “Sweet pies to fill the void.” It was the most-read article of the month.) Many moons later, Kent has a new best friend, probably more inches on the waistline and a very big Eric-and-Jack-shaped problem.

“I’m not a food critic,” Kent replies, tiredly. “I’m a-” 

“Yes, yes, I know,” Bitty says. “And what about my problems, dear Sir?”

“Retweet the article so you don’t seem ungrateful, drink two cups of coffee at this very fine establishment, race back to your closest bakery and pick up dessert and go out to that Hunan restaurant that just opened around the corner from your place that does that bomb braised pork.”

Bitty starts slow clapping just as a waiter rushes over with a latte as if summoned by Hades himself. 

“Excellent, Parson. But that better be some bomb pork.”

“It’s real bomb,” Kent says. “I even described it as such in my latest write-up, if you ever so deigned yourself to reading the work that allows me to come to these bougie as fuck cafes you insist on patroning.”

“Why would I _deign _myself to reading silly words when I have your opinions offered freely to my face?” Bitty says. “And not just always offered, but yelled, screamed, shoved and served sometimes with a side of spit.”

“It’s called passion,” Kent grumbles. “Anyway. How’s Jack?” 

“Oh, that French-Canadian bastard? I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in about 24 hours.”

“That was the last time you slept, no?” Kent says. “So what I should really be asking is, how was the sex?”

Bitty frowns. “I was thinking about egg tarts.” 

“Egg tarts?” Kent says. “What are you doing with egg tarts? What kind of egg tarts? You’re not fucking with the god-tier _dan tat_, are you?”

“_Dan tats _probably originated from the Portuguese pastel de nata, you know,” Bitty replies. “And I’m not telling you, meanie journo.”

“Whatever. But Jack’s alive?”

Bitty taps on his phone and says, “Seems so. He sent me this photo of his intern stuffing envelopes, like, five minutes ago with the caption, ‘God, I wish that was me.’”

Kent laughs. “Jack just loves that menial labour.”

“It clears his mind,” Bitty says absent-mindedly as he takes a photo of his coffee to send back to Jack. “It’s the –”

“Anxiety, yeah,” Kent says. He taps his spoon against the rim of his nearly empty coffee glass. “Is he still seeing-?”

“Yeah,” Bitty says. “Taking his meds, seeing his therapist, being a good boy. We’re very proud.” He puts his phone down and cradles his chin in his right hand. “No, seriously, he’s doing good. I know he’d really appreciate you asking after him. I’ll let him know, sweetie.”

Kent is transparent as water, and he’s been caught again. Bitty always knows when Kent is meaning more than he says, and it feels like a fucking weight off his shoulders sometimes, to not have to over-think how he’s coming across.

The conversation goes still, and Kent knows something is coming.

“Will you meet up with us sometime this week?” Bitty asks and, predictably, elicits a sigh from Kent.

“Maybe,” he replies.

“We’re both very over it,” Bitty says.

“That’s still up in the air for me,” Kent says, and everything goes sour.

Kent is trying to be a good friend, a good person, a good everything, but sometimes it’s just so hard. He didn’t ask to fall in love with Eric Bittle’s anxious, serious-faced, wonderful, kind, annoying as fuck boyfriend (with a fantastic ass), but he did. Oh, he definitely did. And three weeks ago, in the interest of being a good person, Kent laid the whole messy affair out to the two of them and bid them adieu. Except then Eric showed up at his office with five pies, an open selfie policy (which Kent’s Instagram-hungry colleagues took full advantage of) and told him, “I’m not going anywhere, sugar."

Well, okay. Kent is nothing if not selfish.

Bitty hums. “Okay. I understand. I’ll stop pushing. But Jack is dying, _dying _to talk to you, I know he is. If you’ll let him.”

“I really don’t need another verbal rejection as this point in time,” Kent says. “But thank you, Baking Boy Wonder.”

Bitty slides his sunglasses down from where they perched on his head. “No egg tarts for you, Parson.”  
  
  
  
Kent Parson has a wine-tasting lined up for 6pm that night, in which he promptly gets trashed and Ubers off to the nearest gay bar for some Merlot-induced hedonism. The next morning he throws up and throws out the Merlot-induced hedonism, turning down an offer for brunch to scream into the pillow instead. Self-care at its finest.

It’s a morning blocked out for writing, so he balances his laptop on his thighs and stares at an empty Word document for half an hour before checking Instagram. Badly lit food pictures are truly a hazard of the job, and he puts up with it to keep up with all the hysterically fast openings and closings. As a firm proponent of covering and treating every cuisine at every price-point as food to be taken seriously, Kent falls down the rabbit hole of Instagram with veritable ease.

The first photo in his feed is of Eric, Jack and the in-laws, chopsticks at the ready to dive into a chilli-heavy meal. Eric is wearing a fitted button-down with knee-length shorts, and Jack much of the same, except with jeans. Everyone is happy.

Kent mindlessly double taps.  
  
  
  
Kent and Bitty’s love affair began swiftly, buoyed by a mutual love of food and hate of some of food culture. It rippled out into their own friendship circles, until Kent reached Jack.

The first time they met, he rocked up to their neat two-bedroom apartment in sweatpants and a Las Vegas Aces jersey, a guilty-pleasure Starbucks cooling the left side of his face and an iPhone pressed to the right. His boss was calling to yell at him about getting an ingredient wrong, and Kent is saying, “Yes, okay, I fucked up, Leila, yada-yada-yada. But if they’re going to bastardise Mexican cuisine and plate up a dish with, like, 68 ingredients, what can I say?”

Jack walked in and said, “You are not what I was expecting.”  
  
  
  
There is just something so keenly appealing about Jack that Kent finds hard to wrap his head around. It’s the sweetness, the edge of sadness, the determination to quietly do the right thing… but maybe it’s none of that. Maybe it’s just that one time he gifts an envelope to Kent containing a series of four photos and labels it Sweet Fucking Happiness. Inside: Kent being served a bowl of laksa, capturing as he slurps the noodles up, splashing red coconut-milked broth all over his white tee. Possibly just that did it.


	2. two

**two**

Two months later, Kent is dating someone who eats chicken nuggets for dinner three days out of seven, and it’s possibly the lowest point of his entire life. But it’s just something that started happening to him, so, whatever. It is what it is – right?

He is spacing out as Stuart fucks into him, thinking about how to describe the off-menu, no-name salad that Thai place served him last night and he almost misses that it’s stopped.

“Are you okay?” Stuart asks.

“Yeah. Why would you ask that?”

Kent’s body is an anchor sinking into the mattress. He recognises something building in himself, like an old friend lying in wait. He’s too exhausted to regulate it.

“You’re very absent.”

“There’s nothing to show up for.” Kent wraps himself up in the blanket, sits up in bed.

“Wow. All right. That was mean.”

“You’re right,” Kent says.

“You’re not sorry?”

“Not really.”

“Then why am I here?”

“Because you want to be.”

“And do you want me to be?”

Kent doesn’t respond, and Stuart leaves. Fairy-tale ending.

  
“I can’t believe you haven’t asked to try my egg tarts yet.”

Bitty shows up, unasked and uninvited, to Kent’s house.

“Why do you always insist on foisting upon me these romantic comedic schemes?” Kent replies.

“Because you’re a Katherine Heigl, and that is that.”

“Shady,” Kent mumbles.

Bitty is carrying a box of baked goods (egg tarts, probably) that he dumps on the bench top, tut-tut-tutting his way around the kitchen. The fridge doors are opened and peered into, a disapproving shadow settling on Bitty’s face. (So he didn’t get the chance to go grocery shopping – fucking sue him.)

“I take it that thing with Stuart is over.”

“What tipped you off?”

“There aren’t any chicken nuggets in the freezer.”

Kent laughs and pauses an episode of Chef’s Table, sliding himself up onto one of the kitchen island seats. “I’ve been a bit mopey lately, truth be told, Bits.”

“I know. You didn’t post a celebratory ridiculous Instagram story when the Aces beat the Penguins the other night.”

“The world missed out on a cinematic marvel.” Kent pouts.

“Sure, sugar,” Bitty replies easily. He procures a bottle of pinot noir tucked under the sink (how it got there is beyond Kent’s cognitive capabilities) and pours them two glasses with his hand behind his back, just to show off a little, that fucker. “Now, how was that Asian fusion restaurant opening the other night?”

They settle into banter, and Kent slowly melts into the comfort of the night. During a lull in the conversation, Kent catches himself watching Bitty’s animated hands as he talks about some customer’s grandiose and completely bonkers request. When he was younger, his mom used to tell him never to trust people who talked with their hands. “It betrays bad character,” she used to say, thumbing at the corner of Kent’s chocolate-stained mouth with an air of defeat.

If Kent’s mom was to be believed, then Bitty’s character has to be the worst of the worst. But Kent’s mom never was one to be believed.Bitty seems to realise Kent’s zoned out, and gently taps his fingernails on the countertop. Bitty’s nails are always manicured – cut down as short as possible, filed to perfection.

“You’re too hard on yourself,” Bitty says, half in a huff.

“Someone has to be,” Kent replies, lightly, closes his eyes and tilts his head back. He does this sometimes, in performance, to let eyes linger on himself in profile: sharp jaw, elongated neck, gently curved nose. He does it now, with Bitty, because everything feels spiky and claustrophobic, and something in him wants to lash out. Let him see what they’re both missing, Kent thinks, not kindly.

Bitty breathes out noisily. “I have to go home,” he says. The wine glass clanks as it drops into the sink, noticeably too harshly.

“To Jack,” Kent says.  
  
“Yes, sugar,” Bitty says. “To Jack.”

Kent opens one eye. Bitty looks a bit pissed, jaw and fist clenched tightly. Something’s been happening between them, in the last two months – a tension see-sawing and zipping too fast to understand. He isn’t sure if Bitty made the right decision to stay friends.

“You’re invited, you know.” Bitty says it as he’s clearing up.

“To what?”

“To the birthday party.”  
  
“Stop pitying me.”

Bitty stops. There’s that tension again – see-sawing up so high, Kent’s hair-trigger flight mode is two hairs away from being activated. “Do you think this is pity?”

“Maybe,” Kent shoots back. “I know what you two think of me.”

“And what do we think, Kent Parson?”

“I don’t want to be some golden couple’s pet project,” Kent says.

Bitty pinches his nose bridge between two fingers, just like Kent knew he would. “And I don’t want to be the person you use to convince yourself that you’re worthless,” Bitty says. “I’m not trying to rub anything in your face, and you know that.”   
  
“I know. Baking Boy Wonder would never do that.”

“Hey, fuck you,” Bitty says, lowly. He pauses, for more than three beats. “Just so you know, Jack isn’t doing very well at the moment. I didn’t think I should mention it, but I wanted to, because it’s really stressing me out at the moment, and I’m not sleeping very well, and you’re my friend, and people are meant to be able to lean on friends, aren’t they, Kent?” One light scoff. “We’re not the ‘golden couple’, Kent, and maybe next time you should remember that.”

After Bitty passive aggressively cleans the glassware in silence – expensive, delicate, gifted to Kent but goes for about $100 a pop – he leaves. Kent opens the box of egg tarts and takes a bite. Pettily, he makes note that they’re not as good as the ones from the Hong Kong bakery five minutes away from his house.

He hasn’t seen Jack in months, and so when he thinks of him, the feeling in his chest has changed. It’s still tangled and sad, but muted by age.

Kent slides open Instagram, navigating to Jack’s perfect curated grid, all black-and-white with pops of colour, showing up in deliberate pattern. The last post was one week ago, an abstract snap of one of Bitty and Jack’s friends’ kids up in a tree. The heart below it is already red – he just couldn’t help himself. _Jack isn’t doing very well at the moment._

And, Kent thinks bitterly, as evidenced by this shitty, disaster of a night – neither is he.

“You’ve never been to Bologna before?” someone is saying to him. “You have to go. It’s amazing.”

“There are lots of places in the world that are amazing,” Kent says before he can help himself, before his brain reorients itself. Shit – he needs to stop being such a dick. “But I’d love to go to Bologna.”

The woman in front of him beams. Her hair is in a bob – the bisexual bob, Bitty’s voice in his head says – and coloured grey. “You know, you’re not exactly what I expected.”

“Probably because I’m still not used to the fact that people expect something,” Kent replies. He focuses further on her. Although Kent’s world has always been very big – dinner parties and launches and office blow-outs – his therapist has pointed out he makes no genuine attempt to engage deeply in it. _And that’s bad, Kent, _she said, not gently, or motherly, but matter-of-factly.

“I used to bitch about you a lot,” she admits. “On Twitter. Like, just to have something to bitch about, really. You know, straight, white male food critic, writing about shit he knows nothing about and getting rewarded for it. It got me my job, actually, so thank you for that.” She says all this so blasé, not at all nervously.

“I’m not straight,” Kent says, automatically.

“All right. But you’re white?”

“But I’m white,” he confirms. “How did I get you your job?”

“My employer wanted to tap some diverse creators, or whatever,” she says. “But now they’re making me exclusively cover Asian food. It’s kind of bullshit, but I’m broke, 23, and eating a lot of stuff for free, so, you know.”

Kent smiles. Wide, all teeth. “Sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

There’s just something so intoxicating about having someone get you – about sharing your passions, about slotting into your life so neatly it feels like they’ve always been part of it. October gets him, burrows her little fingers under his skin and his writing until they’re both the better for it.

“I feel like you’re a masochist and literally bullied your boss into hiring me just so I could, in turn, bully you,” October says. “Abusing your God-given privilege.”

“I think it’s just the right karmic thing to do,” Kent says. “I bullied this kid named James when we were both 10. He cried on the playground.”

“Fuck,” October says. “Well. This one’s for James.” And she slides a piece of paper over the table. There’s a lot of red.

“You’re crossing out my best material,” Kent whines.

“I’m crossing out the material that made me call you out on social media in the first place,” October says, crossing her arms. “There’s a way of cultivating a personality and having a voice _without _sounding arrogant.”

“Like you?” Kent says.

“Exactly.”

So him and October get each other. But he still misses Bitty – reminds him of just how _much _he misses Bitty.

Kent has always had a flair for the dramatic – when he goes big, he goes big. Grand gestures, big flowers, showing up at 3am in the morning soaked in rain and throwing pebbles at the window. He’s given Bitty and Jack some space, and they’ve given him some space, and they haven’t talked in awhile, and Kent is not sure they’ll forgive him for that. After all, when Bitty left, the ball was left in Kent’s court, ready for the first lob.

On a Wednesday evening, he knocks on the door of Bitty and Jack’s apartment.

Jack opens the door. He’s wearing grey sweatpants – Jesus – and a hoodie, his cheek sleep-creased and his eyes very blue.

“Kent,” he says.


End file.
